HopeHealth Visiting Nurse accredited for home care & palliative care

Photo: HopeHealth Visiting Nurse

After completing a rigorous review this spring, HopeHealth Visiting Nurse has once again received accreditation for its home care and recertification of its community-based palliative care programs from The Joint Commission.

The Joint Commission awarded HopeHealth its Gold Seal of Approval^® for demonstrating continuous compliance with performance standards. The Joint Commission conducted a five-day virtual review that began March 1, 2021. The Gold Seal is a symbol of quality that reflects a health care organization’s commitment to providing safe and quality patient care.

“The surveyors were very complimentary about our staff and the care provided,” says Chief Operating Officer Maureen Bischoff. “The hard work and commitment of our staff came shining through.”

The reviewers called HopeHealth Visiting Nurse “ahead of the curve with clinical programs, patient management, knowledgeable staff and innovative thinking.” They also called the HopeHealth palliative care program embedded in the home health team “one of the Top 10 in the country.”

The virtual review was conducted in a series of Zoom meetings, allowing surveyors to observe HopeHealth clinicians and leaders as they provided care in patient homes. Care teams were evaluated for compliance with home care standards in the areas of emergency management, environment of care, provision of care, record of care, infection prevention and control, leadership, medication management, and patient rights and responsibilities.

The Joint Commission accreditation survey takes place every three years and typically involves in-person evaluations but was postponed from the spring of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Joint Commission’s standards were developed in consultation with health care experts and providers, measurement experts and patients. They are informed by scientific literature and expert consensus to help health care organizations measure, assess and improve performance.

As a private accreditor, The Joint Commission reviews the performance of health care organizations to protect the public by identifying deficiencies in care and working with those organizations to correct them as quickly and sustainably as possible.

About HopeHealth

For more than a century, HopeHealth has provided high quality, compassionate care to people in various stages of illness to communities in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Its roots began in home care in 1908 and then in hospice in 1976, coming together as HopeHealth in 2011 providing home care, palliative care and hospice care. As the second oldest hospice in the country and one of the largest nonprofit providers of palliative and hospice care in New England, HopeHealth has set the gold standard in serious illness and end-of-life care. HopeHealth is the major teaching affiliate for hospice and palliative care of The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.